A new series looking at fantastic prologues from classic and contemporary horror movies.
In this new SHOCK series, we’ll take a look at some of the most astonishing opening scenes in genre film history. We’re not talking about opening credits sequences, rather we’re riffing on innovative ways filmmakers have set the tone and atmosphere for the movie to follow with drama embedded into bodies of the pictures themselves.
Not every flick we’ll be discussing stands as a classic. Some of them won’t necessarily even be any good (though, really, there’s no such thing as a bad movie if someone loves it). But whatever picture gets the spotlight, it’s those opening moments we want to focus on. The hook. The sting. The audio/visual vortex used to pull us into an alternate, cinematic universe.
For this first round, I’ll make a case for John Landis’ brilliant, loose, funny and ultimately, disturbing opening to 1983’s Landis/Steven Spielberg produced TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE, a hit or miss feature-length anthology love-letter to Rod Serling’s iconic TV show whose greatest moment rests in its first 5 minutes.
The film opens fading in from black on a classic rock tune, much like it does in Landis’ masterful 1981 blackly comic horror classic AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. In that picture, we enter the landscape of the Yorkshire moors, just before twilight, with strains of “Blue Moon” by Bobby Vinton seeping over the soundtrack, lulling us into an eerie calm, a sense of well being that’s hampered by the fact that we know that we’re watching a horror film and it’s very likely that bad things will shatter this tranquility soon.
TZ:TM’s post-WB logo prologue is a quote on that sequence, as we see the Hollywood Hills, late at night, with a car speeding round the bend and, instead of Bobby V., we hear the opening twang of CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL‘s barstool version of the ancient folk tune “Midnight Special” and are very quickly introduced to two men, the driver (comedian, actor and filmmaker Albert Brooks) and the passenger (the inimitable Dan Akroyd).
Both men, especially the driver, are lost in the thralls of CCR as they drive deeper into the night, destination unknown. When the cassette tape player malfunctions and shreds all hope of finishing the tune, the pair are forced to find ways to keep the vibe going; first the driver asks if his new friend (we are led to believe that the passenger is a hitch-hiker) wants to “see something really scary” and, when that goes sour, they quickly rebound by playing a classic TV-centric version of “Name that Tune” in which, eventually, their attentions drift towards THE TWILIGHT ZONE.
At this point, they do what every grown-up who grew-up watching TZ do and that’s share their favorite moments and episodes from the series and then…well…something happens.
It’s a great moment to start what was designed to be the ultimate salute to Serling. Of course, we all know that due to the other Landis-directed segment of the picture and its central, fatal accident, a shadow was cast on the entire production, one that decimated Landis and Spielberg’s friendship, almost derailed Landis’ career and ended in the deaths of three human beings.
That tragedy is now part of Hollywood history (google it in case you don’t know what I’m talking about) but it doesn’t dampen the many things that TZ: TM does right (George Miller’s remake of the TZ classic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is a highlight), including this great short film that opens the picture, one that, outside of positioning itself as a stylized companion to AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, also plays like an extended version of one of that film’s shocking and twisted dream sequences.
But enough blather.
Press the right-pointing triangle in the square below and groove to the clip.
It’s my pick for the first of many awesome opening sequences to come…
